Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-07-01-Speech-2-116"
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"en.20030701.5.2-116"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, with these two reports by Mr Trakatellis and Mrs Scheele, we are once again looking at GMOs, but through the wrong end of the telescope. We are talking, in effect, about traceability, labelling, zero tolerance, maximum thresholds, freedom of choice for the consumer, health, the environment and precautions.
While all this is going on, who is looking at GMOs in Washington? The answer is, President Bush himself, who is urging the European Union to put an end to its moratorium and has even brought the matter before a panel of the World Trade Organization. Likewise, who, in President Bush’s entourage, is looking at GMOs? I can give you a list. There is John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General. His senatorial election campaign in Missouri was partly funded by Monsanto, a GMO multinational. Then there is Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence, the President of a laboratory that Monsanto bought in 1985. There is Ann Vaneman, US Secretary of Agriculture, a member of the Board of Directors of Calgene, the multinational which created Flower, the first transgenic tomato. There is also Linda Fisher, Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, formerly responsible for the Monsanto lobbying bureau in Washington, and finally there is Clarence Thomas, a judge of the US Supreme Court, who was nominated to his position by Bush Senior and who used to be a lawyer at Monsanto. I could go on; the list is a long one.
What does this mean? It means that the Bush administration is treating the GMO issue as a matter of sovereignty, in economic, industrial, scientific and agrifood terms. Just as it did in the case of bananas, hormones in meat, oilseeds, cereals and chickens, the United States is turning GMOs into yet another battle in the transatlantic agriculture wars. Meanwhile, what are we doing? Our legalism is up against their imperialism.
Yet the real question, Madam President, is not a scientific one concerning health or the environment. It is the same question as it has been for forty years. Does Europe, with its 450 million inhabitants, want to be independent? In the Persian Gulf, it said ‘no’ while, at the same time, accepting the American war. In the Gulf of Mexico, at Cancun, on 14 September, if it says no it will be an agricultural and tropical Munich, but then Europe is female and loves to be dominated."@en1
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